The fastest sales growth opportunity is always right in front of you.
But because this industry has endless selling options (we can sell to multiple buyers/departments HR or marketing, or procurement; we can sell hats/apparel vs selling award), we often neglect our missing opportunities for growth.
Why?
Because “busyness” fools you into thinking you’re growing. And maybe you are. But are you growing your accounts at the rate of your ability to react, or at the rate of their opportunity to grow?
Does your busyness blind you to greater growth beyond your ability to see?
Shops are a great example of sales opportunity neglect. If you’ve built a shop for a customer, you have an opportunity in front of you just waiting to grow. A shop just needs a little water and sun (a little more of your proactive attention) and soon, watch it bloom. Perhaps you built a shop for a client and this was your experience:
You built an amazing shop, you had a big roll-out, maybe even a launch party, aaaaannndd … crickets. Or, maybe a small trickle of sales tumbled in but nothing like what you expected.
Or, you created a shop for a client that received some initial buzz and a surge of buying, but after 30 days, sales swiftly declined and now your once-thriving shop barely has a pulse.
Or maybe your shop’s going great but you know that (because the client opportunity is so incredible) it could be so much better.
The good news is, there’s a fix for this and it’s simple. To make it easy, we’ve compiled this quick checklist for you to quickly bring back to life a struggling shop. Here’s an easy 5-Point Checklist to tick off against each of your shops to ensure they are growing.
- Present by Season.
- Adopt the Drop (and crush the collab!)
- Inspire new buyers
- (Re)Market Your Shop
- Redesign & Refresh
(1) PRESENT NEW IDEAS BY SEASON
For your core products, present new ideas on a schedule, if not quarterly, at least twice a year (once for fall/winter, once for spring/summer). Some of us think we do this, but is it an actual meeting on your calendar for each of your shop clients? And do you use this opportunity to create a small party to announce all the really cool gear you’re about to show? Getting your clients accustomed to a buying cycle is one of those great sales habits the best in the business do to spark fast growth. And for commonsku users, to make the product selection process easy, start with commonsku’s supplier collections, narrow down your new collection to just the right products, and in a few simple clicks, you can populate your shop with the new ideas in minutes! (After a while, you’ll build up an incredible amount of collections for your clients, here’s an example featuring each of ours!). Are you presenting new ideas by season to each of your shop clients or do you flood them with ideas just hoping they’ll buy? Be strategic and watch your sales soar.
(2) ADOPT THE DROP + CRUSH THE COLLAB
When Supreme’s James Jebbia created the new product release model —now adopted worldwide by fashion brands everywhere— as “the drop” he did so for good reason: they were unsure they would be able to keep in stock the items they were releasing. Sound familiar? (Supply chain problems, anyone?) Instead, Jebbia created what’s known as “the drop,” a short release of exclusive items available for a limited time only. You might have a core collection for your clients that you’ve created, but have you introduced the drop model to your buyers? It is such an easy sale because your buyers are familiar with the concept. All too often, salespeople in our industry see a supplier announce a new brand-driven product and they simply introduce it to their customer as one idea of a hundred ideas. Wrong. The next time Gemline or PCNA introduces some hot new brand in the industry, create a collab with your customer's shop and introduce your client’s logo + that hot new brand as a drop. Example: “Just in time for outdoor season, we’re dropping a new collab with [your client’s name] x Osprey.” Make it a limited-time run and watch the orders roll in.
(3) INSPIRE NEW BUYERS
There are two types of buyers in a shop: your primary buyer, who makes all the buying decisions with you on which items go in the shop and how many they buy, etc. And then there are the end-users. Your primary buyer might be in HR but have you partnered with your buyer to bring the marketing folks to the table? Or manufacturing execs? Or the executive suite? Using your quarterly or biannual new product experience to invite new buyers from your client to help create the next collection. Getting their buy-in and active participation will lead to new sales growth. And while we’re at it, have you ever measured your user/buyer participation in your shop? For example: If your shop serves a client that has 1,000 employees and you only have 650 employees participating, then you have a golden opportunity, which leads to our next tip ….
(4) MARKET YOUR SHOP (AGAIN AND AGAIN)
Our industry suffers terribly from the “build it and they will come” malady. It’s false. Build it and they’ll come once … maybe twice. But now that the economy has picked up from the pandemic, we’re seeing a drop in attention (Axios called it America’s attention recession). It was always hard to get a buyer’s attention, and now with the attention recession and the seemingly ceaseless uptick in global news challenges and catastrophes, you have a lot more mindshare to compete with. Breath fresh energy into your shop by partnering with your client to create a regularly scheduled marketing newsletter and social media campaign to introduce your new drops, new capsules, and new collabs.
(5) DESIGN/REFRESH
Launch your shop last year? How about the year before? It is time for an upgrade? A simple redesign and refresh will give you an excuse to market the store in a new way. Craft a new redesign campaign with your buyers to coincide with a new collection drop or to coincide with some big news released by your client (maybe they hit the Fortune 500/5,000 list, or made a “best places to work for” list. A shop redesign and refresh is a simple way to pique your buyers’ curiosity!
Now, take this 5-point checklist and compare it against each of your shops. How would you score yourself on creating new buyers with your shop? Marketing your shop? Getting your buyers on a buying calendar?
We work in an industry saturated in busyness. A busyness that, if we’re not careful, can lead us to create a habit of neglect with our best clients and our greatest sales opportunities.
Don’t let the good (busyness, deadlines, and reacting to orders), blind you to the great (growing sales with the clients who love you and trust you the most).
Here are some additional blog resources to help you boost your sales: